An imaginary creature from a world that I am building these days for the GURPS role-playing game that I am GM'ing for my brother, cousin and a very close friend... both of the last two as close as brothers actually. BroGURPS.
The animal is harmless, about the size of a squirrel and inhabiting about the same ecological niche, it's ugly, has a strange name, and is a nut eater.
The head is the most alien about it. It has a face turned towards the ground which is mainly used for eating. On top of this it has another head which is mostly sensorium to spot enemies and with some small manipulative arms. Of the order Oktotaupi (yes there are more coming).
Tolkien made everything much easier for himself by using horses, ravens, and all sort of other animals already present in England.
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ewwww, very lovecraftian. Honestly reminds me a little bit of the Mi-Go. A flying lobster-like creature with a fungal-like skin.
Had to look Mi-Go up. I had an idea of something insect like, but the lobster part I had completely overlooked. There's so much strangeness to extract from that already strange man's works.
I love Tolkien, and I imagine trying to describe creatures any more complicated than ents or orcs would be pretty hard. Now, if he'd had you as an illustrator, his fiction could have been much more interesting!
Cool creature. Two heads! Of course though, really. Why not?
I am reading Lord of the Rings aloud for the family in the evenings. We are on the last chapter of the first book. When I read it again it strikes me how much time he uses on nature and the way human (and elfish and dwarfish etc.) history slowly sinks and merge into the big common world that we all inhabit animals and and humans. It is not strange that the hippies loved him. A true romantic. I am reading in the fine Danish translation, but I have also read his books in English and I think the language rivals the best of English literature.
Can't say I have ever read anything in a fine Danish translation. I only speak English - isn't that embarrassing? I loved Tolkien before hippies were even a thing (ok that sounds good but really I was still too young to have read Tolkien when hippies were a thing). I still love him, maybe because of his successful merging of nature, human nature, and fantastical natures. There are few other authors that can cast the kind of spells Tolkien casts. Robertson Davies is one. That Harry Potter author is most definitely not.
When you are from a small country it becomes necessary to speak and read more than one language. English is like a second language here even for people with less education. Only very few have read a fine Danish translation because we are so very few - and on top of that: the newer translations are often crap. I have found stupid mistakes in especially English translated literature, so when I sometimes read older books from before this time of sloppy stressfulness, I always notice and enjoy it immensely.
I never read any Robertson Davies, had to look him up actually, but he has been put on my reading list as of now. Tolkien was also from another time and I think it shows in tempo, the wonderful flowing prose, and the sense of details. His project was personal, idiosyncratic even, and that lends the books the air of real myth. But to me it is still the voice and the closeness to nature that carry the books.
I wonder how this lil creature would taste 🤔 lobster or squirrel? 😋 boiled like crab legs and dipped in butter. That is- if it isn’t poisonous. Great original design!
The world to which this creature belongs is flooded with crabs, so I guess that the taste is a bit crabby. When reading your comment I was thinking of another creature that I am creating with my daughter and brother for at D&D project on Kickstarter which is actually a combination of squirrel and crabfish... There are some crossing tracks in my projects it seems.
He looks like a fellow I'd come across under a leaf or rock in my garden :) Love it @katharsisdrill
I can imagine that such things exist in your magical garden!
I can imagine something like that evolving in an alternate timeline. Creature fill available niches. There are crabs that climb trees in our world.
Have fun!
!PIZZA
One of the favourite books of me and my brother when we were children, was called, After Man, and was an imagined zoology where rats and rabbits and other successful races was populating earth in new versions. I am certainly in dept to that book.
I'm not sure if I read that, but I did read a lot of fantasy as a kid and it seems somehow familiar. Humans see themselves as the pinnacle of evolution, but it keeps going anyway. Just have to hope we don't wipe out all these creatures before they get a chance.
It was made like a natural history for children. As I remember it it was rats, rabbits, and some hideous bats, so the idea was that humans had wiped out a lot of species and then from the surviving animals new species evolved. Very fascinating book.
Sounds right up your street.
:)